So continuing the oddity of ancestry: Gilgamesh was said to be 2/3 divine. His father was Lugalbanda, a god king, and his mom was Ninsun, a goddess, so I’m not sure how this works, but let’s assume it’s this:
Let’s assume Lugalbanda (or “Lou”) and Ninsun (or “Sunny”) were half siblings. Assume Lugalbanda’s father was a mortal and his mother was Ishtar. Let’s assume that Sunny’s father was a traveling sales god (but a god) and her mother was Ishtar.
So Gilgamesh Has Three Grandparents (an early predecessor to the multicultural children’s tablet “Agamashandarakstiun Has Two Mommies” and it’s companion tablet “Vehandrahstanmishti’s Daddy’s New Bedchamber Slave”).
Grandfather 1: a moral
Grandfather 2: divine
Grandmother: divine
His mother is therefore divine, his father is 1/2 divine. Assuming all the gods involved had 2 parents, would Gilgamesh be 2/3 divine, or would he be 3/4 divine?
There’s no way to get exactly 2/3 ancestry of anything, with a finite number of generations of ancestors. Nor, for that matter, any other fraction whose denominator isn’t a power of 2. You could have someone who’s 3/4 something, or 5/8, or 11/16, or 683/1024, or so on, but never exactly 2/3.
You gotta quit this focus on the number of distinct people in a generation, it’s not relevant. N generations ago, there will be 2[sup]N[/sup] “slots” for ancestors, and the occupant of each of those slots will contribute 1/(2[sup]N[/sup]) of the descendant’s genes. And it doesn’t matter whether each of these people is distinct. If the same person occupies multiple slots, he will contribute multiple shares of the descendant’s ancestry, and that’s all there is to it.
Suppose Josephine is cloned 126 times, with half the clones having a Y chromosome inserted to replace one of the X chromosomes in the 23rd pair, making them male. The clones all mate with each other, producing a single offspring each, while Josephine herself mates with Rupert, again producing one offspring, leaving 64 individuals in the second generation. They repeat the process for five more generations, producing a single great-great-great-great-grandchild, Quentin. Would you really claim that since Quentin only has two great-great-great-great-grandparents, half of his descent comes from Rupert? Pish-posh. Rupert is a mere drop in the gene pool; Quentin shares nearly all of his genes with Josephine.
And yeah, there’s no way to get a denominator that isn’t a power of 2. Having 1/3 or 2/3 descent is impossible.
That aside, wouldn’t the offspring’s mother also be its father? Or are parthenogenetic offspring clones? For a clone, its grandfather and grandmother (maternal side) would be its father and mother, while its mother would be a place-holder. Still an even denominator.
Those ol’ Greeks sure were inventive, I’ll give them that. It’s interesting that Zeus attempted to forestall a prophecy of his overthrow by swallowing a person… Zeus’s own father, Kronos, did the same to Zeus’s siblings, until his mother Rhea gave Kronos a rock in swaddling clothes rather than the newborn infant Zeus to swallow. Kronos, proof that immortality and deity do not necessarily confer wit, swallowed the stone without noticing any difference and eventually was overthrown and chained by Zeus and his undigested siblings. You’d think that such an experience would give Zeus some sense of the injustice involved in swallowing people, but no.
(This is from memory and it’s been awhile, so I apologize for any inaccuracies.)
As for Hephaestus, if the Greeks knew anything about genealogy, they’d have known that the parthenogenic offspring of a female are always female, and are genetic clones of their mother, which is why higher-order animals abandoned parthenogenesis long ago. Sex may be messy and inconvenient, but you can’t beat it for rapidly improving the gene pool.
They’re not actually clones. All of their genetic information comes from their mother, but the mother (depending on exactly how reproduction is accomplished) may have genetic information that the offspring don’t. They’re also not always female (turkeys, for instance, can hatch males parthenogenically, because in birds, it’s males that are XX and females that are XY). Other than that, you’re right on.
Yes, I should have specified that I meant in species (like humans) which mate two at a time. But there’s no inherent reason why mating must be two at a time, and one could certainly imagine other arrangements (which, knowing how crazy life can actually be, has probably come up with some species or another on this planet).
